Weeknote 18/2024
This week has involved a lot of painting, with it taking two coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover the purple feature walls left by the previous owners of our house. It’s also been the first week of my second MSc module, and my wife has been in hospital for an operation that involved general anesthetic. She’s recovering well.
I tried to vote on Thursday in the local elections for the North of Tyne Mayor and the Police & Crime Commissioner. I usually vote by post, but hadn’t received a form, so went in person to County Hall. They turned me away: despite filling in all of the forms, apparently I wasn’t registered. I took this up with an elections officer, but they were having none of it. Given that we’ve had problems registering our son to vote, I suspect there’s a systemic issue, but at least the person in charge of elections in Northumberland has reached out to me on LinkedIn, promising to investigate.
Talking of our son, he had his first driving lesson with an instructor this week, who said that he drives quite quickly. Runs in the family, I suppose. He played really well in a basketball game yesterday, and has started training with a different local football team so that he can play a final year of junior football before going into the men’s leagues.
In terms of our daughter, after a game on Tuesday for her mixed team in which she hurt her other ankle, we’ve insisted that she has two weeks off football and running around in general. I didn’t count her assists, but in total she played 59 goals this season, scoring 62 goals. Given that she was playing a year up for her main team, and dropped back into midfield after Christmas, that’s pretty incredible.
Work-wise, we ran a workshop on Monday for the Toro Impact project with CSUDH. I was told that I have a nice voice, but I think that’s just because Americans tend to like English accents. I received some lovely personal feedback from someone new to the ORE community call on Tuesday, who said that I was a “warm and generous host” who obviously cared about each and every person on the call. I appreciated that, and it was apt given the recognition focus of that community call.
For the DCC, we did some of our ongoing work, but also helped them prepare their submission for the 1EdTech Learning Impact Awards. I quite enjoyed doing this, taking a narrative approach rather than a technical one. Anything that looks like design, though, I leave to Laura otherwise we end up with something like this:
I also helped workers.coop some technical stuff around Google OAuth. We could do with a more work at the moment, to be honest but I’m a bit reticent to use the ‘open to work’ badge on LinkedIn for various reasons. It’s heartening to know that we’re not the only ones looking at a quieter-than-usual May, but sadly that doesn’t pay the mortgage!
It’s the early Bank Holiday weekend in lieu of International Workers Day. The latter was on Wednesday and, as is our tradition Laura and John didn’t work. However, I had some DCC stuff to do after spending the morning studying in the library, so sneaked some in .May 1st also means that WAO is now eight years old! It’s been quite the ride.
Next week will be a shorter one, work-wise. I guess I’ll be doing some business development, which will continue while Laura and Anne are away cycling the west coast of Ireland. I’m taking a more pragmatic approach to my MSc modules, skipping some of the more basic activities. After all, I’m the one paying for it and I’m not doing it for anyone else’s benefit.
Main image: wild garlic growing in Carlisle Park, Morpeth
